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7 new tools that will streamline your marketing campaigns

Content marketing and social media are fast becoming the core of marketing for many businesses — and for good reason. WhatsApp has clocked in more than 1 billion users, Facebook is boasting nearly 1.5 billion monthly active users; and, as of 2015, the share of video plays on mobile devices exceeded 44 percent. (That number was up 74 percent from 2014, and a staggering 844 percent since 2012.)

So, there’s definitely a captive audience out there. But you need to know how to effectively leverage not only the content you’re producing, but also the channels you use and the audiences you target. Trying to juggle it all around creating the content while also running a business will net you very little progress.

Even with a clever marketing team or an ace freelancer in your pocket, there’s still a lot you can do to be more efficient. Thankfully, there are plenty of apps and tools that can help you streamline your marketing campaigns seamlessly. Here are seven of my favorites.

1. Quuu.co

Quuu is a simple platform to help put your content curation on autopilot, working seamlessly with Buffer to bring you the most relevant content. It simplifies one of the most time-consuming aspects of marketing — curating content that your audience wants to see. At any time, you can edit the content through your account and change what type of content is pulled. Best of all, it’s not computer-aggregated content: It’s manually selected by people, just for you.

“The biggest daily challenge of social media is finding enough content to share,” writes Guy Kawasaki in his book The Art of Social Media. “We call this ‘feeding the content monster.’ There are two ways to do this: content creation and content curation.”

2. Narrow.io

If you want to promote your content, it stands to reason that you need to leverage influencers and followers. While services like Twitter have pretty much eliminated the ability to use automated following platforms, you can still use Narrow to build a targeted Twitter following. Just enter your keywords and targeted hashtags, and Narrow will identify a relevant audience for you to start building your following.

3. Sumorank

If you want to throw an entire day away, try scrolling back through your old Facebook content to compare it to your Insights. You don’t have to manually peruse content in order to leverage your Facebook rank and see how you’re doing, though SumoRank, from Buzzsumo, is a great app that lets you analyze and rank your content based on popularity.

It’s a fast way to get an idea of the most popular and most engaging content, whether that means video, image, text or content shares. You can dig deep into the stats to see the monthly engagement per post, as well as engagement rates based on the number of characters in a post.

Best of all, you can (and should) use it to see what competitors and influencers are doing with their Facebook presence.

You need to dig into the Insights to learn how to better engage your fans; otherwise they’re just a number on your page. As consultant Jay Baer of Convince & Convert, has said: “Activate your fans; don’t just collect them like baseball cards.”

4. Cyfe

Cyfe is an all-in-one marketing dashboard of sorts that helps you zero in on what’s working and what isn’t. It’s a great analytical tool for social media management that lets you pulled detailed reports on Google Analytics, AdWords campaigns, SEO, competitive searches and even brand mentions on the web. It’s a real-time tracking tool to help you monitor and manage your KPIs.

5. Beegit

Companies like EYStudios, an ecommerce website design and development company, take the right approach to content marketing. They tap their entire talent pool, from designers to account managers, to create content for their blogs and webinars. Beegit is an app built to help streamline just that kind of team collaboration.

This collaborative writing tool allows teams to work cohesively, no matter where they are, to create exceptional content. It includes an editorial calendar and communication, workflow and writing tools, all in one place.

6. Brightcove

You can get a lot done with short video clips on Vine, Periscope and even Snapchat, but if you’re creating stand-alone videos, you want to be able to leverage that content quickly. Manual posting and management of video sites wastes a lot of time. Brightcove is a comprehensive tool for creating high-quality video experiences, managing that content, publishing it out to multiple services and measuring the performance of your video-marketing campaigns.

7. Buffer

Have you met Buffer? Buffer ensures that you never run out of content to be shared out to your social channels and followers. It integrates with your social content and makes it easy to schedule your posts at the best possible times throughout the day, so that your fans see content from you more often. Just add content and choose the time and social account(s) for each post.

“Timing is everything, and in brevity there’s clarity,” writes Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter Group. “Studies already show that the time and day and the language structure of tweets and Facebook updates determine overall reach and engagement. Optimize language and timing to make every update count.”